Me and MLK

The day after MLK's day, I am thinking about a very remote linkage I have to the man -- he was a guest of the liberal synagogue in Evanston that I went to as a youth. This happened a few months before I was born:

Highest-profile visitors: On Jan. 13, 1958, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. spoke at Beth Emet, delivering an address, "The Desirability of Being Maladjusted." Beth Emet and Rabbi David Polish, the founding rabbi of the congregation, offered him a platform when few were willing to do so. "It was the first place he spoke at in the city of Chicago," said executive director Bekki Harris Kaplan.

I like the title. I read somewhere that King had to stay at the rabbi's house because no hotel would put him up back then.

Idiocracy

I watched Idiocracy over the weekend, thought it was pretty funny but didn't rise to the genius level required of a real cult film.

Then I saw this real-life version and realized it's a goddamn piece of prophecy.

MLK Day

MLK day today. A time to remember that religion can, on occasion, be a force for good. I am pretty much an outsider to religion, but I have to admire it's ability to organize and deploy what Gandhi and MLK called "soul-force". The soul may be a fiction but clearly it's a fiction that can have effects in the real world.

God's-eye view

Gary Drescher insists that we take the worldview of physics seriously and apply it to ordinary life, producing some profoundly non-intuitive results -- the flow of time is illusory; the universe is constantly splitting into multiple copies; we have no free will. None of these are new ideas but Drescher combines them with a ruthless seriousness into a worldview that I've labeled ultramaterialism.

Today it occurred to me that the first of these is perhaps the easiest to understand but the hardest to reconcile with everyday experience. Physics tells us that the universe is composed of four-dimensional spacetime, with time being simply another dimension. So all moments of time exist as spacelike slices of spacetime (or frames of a movie) and the fact that we experience time serially is a mere artifact, rather than an intrinsic property of the universe. So not only is the universe deterministic, everything event from Big Bang to Grand Gnab has (in some sense) already happened.

Drescher has some interesting explanations for why we might experience time serially (and in only one direction), involving entropy among other things, but I don't fully understand them and wil have to reread that chapter a couple more times.

But one thought strikes me: while this is a resolutely non-theist view of reality, it seems that God has been exiled from the universe only to reappear in the subjectivity of the observer and reader. Who else but an omniscient and eternal God could perceive the universe from beginning to end as an unchanging seamless whole? Drescher's book labors to take us out of our human perspective and take a more godlike view of the universe. Author and reader are, by taking this radically un-embodied perspective, almost blasphemously usurping the role of God while denying his reality.

I don't mean this to be an argument against naturalism or for the reality of God (heaven forbid). It's more of an observation of a phenomenon something like conservation of subjectivity -- that is, no matter how hard we try to make a completely mechanistic object of the universe, some notion of a subject slips back in through the back door. Exile God from your thinking and you end up unknowingly writing His vantage point into the foundations of your theory.

Gone to meet Eris

Robert Anton Wilson has departed this universe (although he may still be around in the one next door).

RAW was one of the main influences on my youthful self, and probably explains my distaste for fundamentalists of any stripe.

Here's an electronic epitaph from William Blake:

Now I a fourfold vision see,
And a fourfold vision is given to me;
‘Tis fourfold in my supreme delight
And threefold in soft Beulah’s night
And twofold Always. May God us keep
From Single vision & Newton’s Sleep!

Nice day for an apocalypse

It's time for another doom post; various portents and omens have been crossing the threshold all day.

First, some old reliables:

James Kunstler takes advantage of the warm weather on the East Coast to worry about the really warm weather that might come in the summer. He prophesies food shortages:

My guess is that the weird weather we are getting will increasingly affect crop yields. With populations growing, and weather anomalies increasing, grain surpluses worldwide are now at their lowest point in decades. All the major grain-growing regions have suffered either significant drought (US, Australia, Ukraine, China, Argentina) or flooding (East Africa, India) in recent years.

John Robb warns against "catastrophic superempowerment" (there's the new word of the day), which basically means technology getting into the hands of those who wish us ill. Specifically, he is worried about bioterrorism. Nuclear technology turns out to be difficult and expensive and require scarce expertise. On the other hand biotech is trending towards being extremely cheap and simple. He puts a black twist on another catchy new phrase, "tinkering networks", which is usually used by enthusiastic theorists of open-source and the like:

Not only will large events be more likely, we will likely see the development of a fat tail composed of small events by careless practitioners as tinkering networks develop to take advantage of this newfound superempowerment. Finally, as we saw with Phishing networks, some of these tinkerers will naturally flow into criminal networks that will actively produce weapons of bioterror for profit, and thereby become critical contributors to the global open source war now underway.

Next, on a lighter note of doom the Idiocracy DVD is out today!

Finally, a bold offering by a new name (to me anyway) in doomsaying, Dmitry Orlov, who tells us in Closing the 'Collapse Gap': the USSR was better prepared for peak oil than the US, that we fat-assed Americans are much less prepared to weather a catastrophic economic/social/climactic collapse than the USSR was.

Slide [6] An economic collapse is amazing to observe, and very interesting if described accurately and in detail. A general description tends to fall short of the mark, but let me try. An economic arrangement can continue for quite some time after it becomes untenable, through sheer inertia. But at some point a tide of broken promises and invalidated assumptions sweeps it all out to sea. One such untenable arrangement rests on the notion that it is possible to perpetually borrow more and more money from abroad, to pay for more and more energy imports, while the price of these imports continues to double every few years. Free money with which to buy energy equals free energy, and free energy does not occur in nature. This must therefore be a transient condition. When the flow of energy snaps back toward equilibrium, much of the US economy will be forced to shut down.

Slide [7] I've described what happened to Russia in some detail in one of my articles, which is available on SurvivingPeakOil.com. I don't see why what happens to the United States should be entirely dissimilar, at least in general terms. The specifics will be different, and we will get to them in a moment. We should certainly expect shortages of fuel, food, medicine, and countless consumer items, outages of electricity, gas, and water, breakdowns in transportation systems and other infrastructure, hyperinflation, widespread shutdowns and mass layoffs, along with a lot of despair, confusion, violence, and lawlessness. We definitely should not expect any grand rescue plans, innovative technology programs, or miracles of social cohesion.

Slide [8] When faced with such developments, some people are quick to realize what it is they have to do to survive, and start doing these things, generally without anyone's permission. A sort of economy emerges, completely informal, and often semi-criminal. It revolves around liquidating, and recycling, the remains of the old economy. It is based on direct access to resources, and the threat of force, rather than ownership or legal authority. People who have a problem with this way of doing things, quickly find themselves out of the game.

Read the whole thing, as they say. The gist is that the US hypercapitalist society is going to be much less adaptable to new conditions than was the grungy, corrupt, crony-based culture of the USSR. This guy and Jim Kunstler would get along well.

Now I'm going to go hide under the covers.

New words and new worlds

Jargon of the day: slurl, a url that points to a location within Second Life. Which, btw, has open-sourced its client, a smart move and consistent with their strategy of becoming a platform and not merely an application. This is exciting for me, since I don't have the patience or video-game training to use the VR interface. I imagine somebody now will make a client that makes the world appear like a 90's era text MUD, which is much more accessible and appealing.